


The Siege of Paris

by spinalimmobilization (gilead)



Series: Meet Me There [4]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 03:52:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3921886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilead/pseuds/spinalimmobilization
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The next door neighbour encounters troubled times, and Clarke helps the only way she knows how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Siege of Paris

It begins on a Thursday night in October, when Clarke is winding down with a glass of pinot noir and a documentary about cheese-making nuns. She has just hung up on Finn, after a weekly call reading from a script as follows: she insists that apprenticing at a French patisserie is her only present desire, but all Finn understands is her abandonment. She accuses Finn of hypocrisy, and he replies with a scathing condemnation of her choices, at which point she ends the call as aggrievedly as can be managed with a touch screen.

To Clarke's continued puzzlement, the unit next to hers has been empty for weeks. Her building rests its arthritic haunches in Montmartre, flush with art grads draped head to toe in black, and is more expensive than three-hundred square feet has any right to be. In other words, 4 rue Audran is a hot commodity.

The previous tenant, Murphy, had surrendered the unit and all his possessions before leaving for Tibet to “find himself”. After bidding him an unemotional goodbye, nothing approaching a peep originates from next door, but it has simply been Clarke's newest neighbour demonstrating an uncanny knack for evasion and noiseless furniture conveyance.

It's Thursday night, and the secrecy has dissipated. Someone is hammering on her neighbour's door like a scorned lover. A man's voice shouts, "Lexa, just come home," followed by five more heavy blows. “You know better than this.”

The hallway shakes behind his footfalls, the stairwell door slams, and the building metes out a final, creaky groan.

Clarke lowers her wineglass—still halfway to her lips—slips on a pair of smoking flats, and shuffles down the carpeted hallway. She taps tentatively with one knuckle, twice.

"Hello?" She calls, much quieter. "It's Clarke, your neighbour. He's gone. Are you okay?" She tries her halting French: “Tu me comprends? Je veux t'aider.”

Just the same, no sound exits from behind the door, and Clarke waits until it borders on improper before retreating.

The week passes quietly. The label on the directory next to 306 is changed to Lexa H. Terre, a new wireless network appears by the name of "TP_LINK_A58P3", and an unruly potted basil plant annexes the south-facing balcony. Clarke's schedule is strict, requiring her arrival and departure from the patisserie on the hour, and had she not known better, the unit beside her would still be vacant.

Exactly eight days later, the man returns. The bruising knocks begin when Clarke's rescuing her experimental lemon ricotta galettes from the oven.

“Lexa,” the man bellows. “I know you're in there.”

She opens her door with her elbow, juggling her hot cakes. The man in the hall is hulking and bearded, with shoulders that span the doorway he darkens, and he has already seen her.

“Hi,” she greets, holding up the tray with her crab claw oven mitts. “Galette?”

For a beat, the man gawks at her, then swipes a pastry and stalks into stairwell.

“Lexa, I have pastries.” She entices the obstinate door. “I make them for a living, so they're amazing.”

A car honks outside, and something clatters sharply against the cobblestones. Clarke crouches down, makes a nest of napkins on Lexa's doorstep, and deposits a pastry there. “I'll leave one out here for you.”

When she leaves at five sharp the next morning, the pile of napkins, the galette, and the dusting of powdered sugar on the carpet are gone.

At three, she comes home, hangs a bag of leftover chocolate croissants on Lexa's door, and knocks. The next day, it's brioches, and the day after that, madeleines. Eventually, she stops knocking, but every morning, the bag of leftover pastries will have disappeared. Clarke would not object if her neighbour had an uncontrollable craving for her pastries, but an explanation for her behaviour is not forthcoming.

Lexa's popularity knows no bounds, and on the first Sunday of November, someone else is attempting to dismantle her door. Clarke's the disconcerted owner of a dozen profiteroles after a cancelled last delivery, and she fetches the box from her fridge without deliberation.

It's not the same man, but the woman there is no less imposing, with short cropped hair and extensive facial scarring. Clarke shields herself with the pastries, and plasters on a pleasant expression.

“Hi, fancy a profiterole?”

“Who are you?”

“The neighbour, Clarke.” She lifts the cardboard lid and locks her elbows.

The woman stares into the box for a long while. “You should not insert yourself into things you know nothing about.”

“Well,” Clarke responds frankly, “it seems to me you don't know too much either.”

She finds herself on the smoking end of a murderous glare, and her life-preservation instinct sputters to life. The woman raises a hand, as if to interject, or to strike, but she shoves the box into it and steps back. Fully aware of how nonthreatening one tends to look holding a powder blue box with a graphic of cloud meringues, she flees to her apartment with an unrepentant wave.

Later in the week, at two o'clock on a sunless afternoon, Clarke is alone in the back kneading pulled sugar. An entry excites the bell hung on the door. She wipes her hands on her apron, ambles to the front, and takes in a healthy eyeful.

The woman in her store is rangy, lean, and walks with a saunter led by her shoulders. She flicks through the binder of custom cake orders, and prowls the length of domed glass along the counter.

“You should stop bribing my visitors,” she says. “They're not the nice sort.”

It takes Clarke long enough to catch on. “I'm a pastry chef,” she objects. “This is what I do.”

“What is it that you are doing?”

“Baking?”

It becomes quickly apparent that Lexa has several things in common with her weekly visitors. “This isn't a game.”

"Right," Clarke agrees blankly, the way she does when she has been planning this moment for weeks and it has come and gone. "You should trim your basil before it grows legs."

Lexa quits the patisserie, to the complaints of the tiny bell above the door, and that's when Clarke notices that she's limping.

She doesn't bring Lexa anything that night, but when she staggers to work the next morning, she almost kicks over a rather generous bunch of fresh basil, erupting from a mason jar half-filled with water.

No one visits Lexa for another week, and she and Clarke reach some sort of ceasefire, but it is one so uneventful that Clarke begins to wonder if Lexa's alive.

On her day off, Clarke occupies herself in the kitchen. It's nothing out of the ordinary for her, but an idle evening hour drives her to Lexa's door, flour-smudged and rosy-cheeked from the heat. She knocks as per habit—gently, twice. The door swings open and startles her backwards, just as she's about to leave another offering at the altar of 306.

“Lexa, hi.”

Lexa initial dourness evaporates into neutrality. “Hey, it's the baker.”

“Pastry chef,” Clarke corrects. “I made your basil into vegetable pies. They were a hit with the afternoon crowd, and success is meant to be shared.”

Lexa hesitates, then slinks back inside without shutting the door. Clarke pursues, and understands why Lexa's arrival had gone unnoticed. The visible portion of her flat is barren, a cool expanse of scuffed wood flooring but for pre-existing installations and appliances.

Clarke's defence against uncertainty is to simply not react, and it has always worked in her favour. She carries her tray sedately to the kitchen counter.

“Do you have plates?”

“No.”

“No worries.” She bites into the flaky crust standing there on the linoleum, hand cupped for the crumbs. Lexa follows her example, and outpaces Clarke before long.

Clarke looks for something acceptable to look at. There is only one sign of life there besides Lexa, and she suspects the green overgrowth on Lexa's balcony would be more receptive than the owner.

“Your basil is doing well.” She squints a little harder. “So is the dill, and is that mint?”

Lexa contemplates the plants with what might be pride. “I've never taken care of something before.”

“It's rewarding being a plant mom. I tried the herb garden thing when I first moved in, but I kept forgetting they need water. Maybe I'm not meant for motherhood.”

“You have something else.”

“Oh, the patisserie?” Clarke lets a grin bloom. “Sure, it's a fussy baby, but it's not mine. Maybe one day.”

“You're American. It'll be difficult."

“Am I that transparent?”

“A native Parisian always knows.”

“It's just because I tried my French on you, isn't it? I'll work on it, because I don't have a backup plan, or I guess this was it.”

Lexa grazes on the cubed carrots that have shaken loose, too deliberately offhand: “Because you and your boyfriend have at it so often?”

“I'm sorry. I try not to raise my voice. But he's not—” Clarke sighs, conflicted. “He's the only one that still talks to me. From home. Won't give up on me, whatever that's worth.”

“You still left him.”

“I couldn't stay,” Clarke says. Lexa is looking at her, unblinking and solemn. “Did you—”

The meaty side of a fist interjects at the door. She breaks her regard of Lexa with an instinctive flinch, then glances down at the pan between them. Lexa seizes it before she can, going to the door with sure strides.

“Vegetable pie?” She hears Lexa ask, in a timbre she hasn't heard before.

“What are you doing, playing house with the blonde next door?”

“I'm growing basil. Mint too.”

“There are prettier broads in New York. I can book you a ticket out of this shithole tonight.”

“I like the pastries here.”

“We can play your game as long as you want, Lexa. You'll be back. The fight's in your blood.”

“Then you bled me dry,” Lexa answers, and closes the door. She stands by it, listening, then shows the empty pan to Clarke. “You weren't supposed to hear that.”

“Sorry.” The casual, unfeeling defiance from before is still writ across Lexa features, and Clarke recalls that she doesn't know who exactly she is alone with. “I should go.”

Lexa lets her. Clarke lets Lexa fight her own battles. Sometimes, she hears the sound of cupboards next door, and pots and pans in the sink. From up the street, she begins to notice tendrils of fairy lights coil artlessly through Lexa's balcony garden.

Short visits to the patisserie begin, when Clarke is alone and before she leaves for the day. Lexa brings Clarke dark, strong French roast in styrofoam, and purchases more pastries than Clarke suspects she eats. The dry spell comes to a close with the month, and Lexa points at the gougères with beads of moisture trailing down her neck.

“I'm not expecting anything from you, you know,” Clarke informs her. “I was just sharing what I love. It's kind of uncontainable.”

“I bought a french press.”

“Glad to hear it. I thought your kitchen was missing something. A few things.”

Lexa begins counting out change meticulously. “There was a week I ate nothing but your pastries and trail mix. My leg hurt too much to leave.”

She bites down on the inside of her cheek, ringing up Lexa's order. “Did they do that to you?”

“Do what?”

“Lexa.”

“I did it to myself.”

Clarke puts the cheese puffs in a box. “What made you leave?”

“I don't know who I am when I'm not fighting.”

“That's okay.” Clarke tapes the lid shut and slides the box across the laminate. “I don't know, either.”

On the weekend, Clarke cries over Finn, and Lexa shows up at her door, bearing a rondeau of lamb stew and a bouquet of rosemary and thyme.

“Did you hear me?” Clarke demands, mortified and clutching her cheeks. “God, I'm so embarrassed.”

“It sounded final.”

“I think it has been for a long time.”

“Come on, I can't eat this alone.” Lexa starts forward into the apartment, and Clarke has to dodge her.

“You're stubborn as a treat,” Clarke laughs. “But I guess I am too.”

She sets the table, pulls out the chairs, and pairs their meal with a bottle of malbec. Lexa helps, but she eventually defects to run her fingers over the spines of Clarke's recipe books, the sun-bleached curtains, and the clippings from Le Figaro on the coffee table, marked with Clarke's painstaking translations.

“You've bungled your prepositions, ma pauvre.”

“Shush. Come eat, Lexa.”

Lexa obeys. The fingers on her left hand are crooked, and her left foot drags unobtrusively. Clarke watches her openly, arranging the herbs in water.

“Do you like them?”

“Very much. Is this your way of asking for more vegetable pie?”

“Anything you make is perfect.” Lexa fiddles with the ladle. “I hope you'll be able to say the same after this.”

“Don't be like that. I was salivating after work in the hallway.”

Clarke takes a bite, and Lexa's just as overt with her glances, but Clarke weathers them with far less grace. Across from her, Lexa grows less rigid, more sluggish, a study in contrasts.

“I don't admit this to many people,” Clarke confesses into the rim of her glass, “but my skills don't really transfer to the stovetop. So this was wonderful. ”

“I don't believe it, but thank you, Clarke, I mean it.”

“Let me make it very clear. You don't owe me a thing.”

Lexa leans back. “If you insist.”

Without instruction, Clarke stacks the plates, and Lexa brings the cutlery. She submerges the glassware, and Lexa stands by her side and dries.

Finished, Clarke flings a few suds Lexa's way. “You've got to introduce me to whoever taught you to cook.”

“She's a long way from Paris.”

“Does she know you're home?”

Lexa presses her lips together. “On the phone. He was asking you to come home, too.”

“Well, I like who I am here.”

“So do I.”

Clarke turns to her, barely breathing. “Don't you find it freeing, when no one expects you to be like anything you were before?”

“You missed a bit of flour,” Lexa gestures, skips the pad of her thumb over Clarke's temple, leaves it there. “There.”

The tension stretches, then snaps. Searchingly, Clarke leans into Lexa, and Lexa pushes back into her mouth, rough like she doesn't know anything else. Clarke holds the tense flex of Lexa's jaw under her hand, and eases away in millimetres, not permitting her aggression. The pace of Lexa against her abates, so much that they come to a standstill, and Lexa's sounding another retreat.

“I didn't come here for this.”

“Lexa, it's okay.”

“I need to go.”

It's a war of attrition with Lexa, and Clarke resumes the fight.

November blends into December, and the sky begins to take on that delicate and wounded quality of light that could only portend snow. Clarke brings Lexa weekly collections of odds and ends from her own experiments and from the patisserie, pitting herself against the amorphous silence. She comes home to traces of Lexa's cooking, and catches tourists photographing Lexa's balcony from the street below.

She thinks of Lexa often, but the season keeps her occupied. She contrives holiday cheer by making a Christmas tableau for the window display with nothing but fondant and gum paste. Her customers voice their appreciation, and still Clarke pictures the moue of Lexa's lips.

The week before Christmas, she wedges a note between the chaussons aux pommes: an invitation to a dinner she is planning with a modest group of expatriate friends. She laughs freely during the dinner, and Lexa makes an appearance when Clarke is bringing out the yule log—which is, after all, only expected—in the most timid of a state Clarke has ever seen.

“This is Lexa.” Clarke introduces Lexa to the assembled party, an arm slipped through hers. “She's had more of my pastries than all of you combined.”

They draw Lexa into the circle with talk of how a doughnut-baking competition on the food network once inspired Clarke to pair fried chicken with phyllo, and whether Lexa has ever experienced worse. Lexa denies it with half a smile, and it stands in Clarke's throat for the rest of the evening.

Lexa helps Clarke with the dishes, and with a grudging armful of leftovers, plants her feet on the threshold.

“Have you ever had a proper tour of Montmartre?”

“I mean, I've been working, trying to stay on my feet,” Clarke edges out, hoping that she hasn't revealed the extent of her ignorance in her post-dinner complacency.

“May I take you?” Lexa poses the question low and smooth, like it's been rehearsed.

Clarke gives in.

The tour proceeds with a silent ride on the funicular up the butte at sunrise, and they ascend the steps to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica. Clarke looks at the mosaic in the apse, at the panorama of Paris from the dome, at the pattern Lexa's eyelashes make under a sunbeam.

Lexa takes her to Espace Dalí, where Clarke turns her head every which way. It lures a smile out of Lexa, and she begins to lead Clarke up and down the narrow and sloping streets with a look in her eye. There's the bric-a-brac market on Rochechouart with its bizarre ashtrays, cider and antipasti over a view of the only vinyard left in Paris, people-watching in gardens that used to be gypsum quarries. Lexa shares nothing of herself, and everything of Montmartre, but Clarke begins to lose the distinction.

In the late afternoon, Lexa rushes her through Place du Tertre, but a grizzled artist calls to Clarke in heavily accented English, as if she's a tourist. Clarke surprises him with her own accented French, and stands gamely while Lexa speaks to him so quick-fire that Clarke gives up on interpreting, but listens hungrily to nevertheless.

“Tu portes mon espoir, ma soeur,” the artist says, in parting. He charges Clarke for one, but the portrait is of them together. Clarke is smiling luminously at the observer, and Lexa stands behind and to the left, watching with wistful caution.

The shadows lengthen without their notice. They walk through the garden square after drinking café calva behind a steamy window. A patchy crowd around an installation draws Clarke's attention, but Lexa, for the first time that day, seems reluctant to chase her.

It's forty square feet of enamelled lava, each tile inscribed with a pithy phrase in a different language, and Clarke recognizes it in enough: mahal kita, ich liebe dich, te amo, je t'aime. It's the sort of thing a grown woman turns her nose up at, precisely in the way Lexa is. Clarke lets it take her away, then remembers she has no one to send photos home to.

“Clarke,” Lexa speaks up, fingers on Clarke's wrist. “Let's go.”

Clarke yanks back, just barely, just enough. “I want this to mean something. I came all this way.”

“What will make it mean something?”

“I don't know.” She has words she knows Lexa doesn't care to hear, and it's unfair to be so fanciful, after all that they've endured, being where they are, but she can't help her nature.

“Your collar's inside out.” Lexa fixes it placidly. “Did you understand what the artist said, back there?”

“He shouldn't have said that. You don't do that anymore.”

“No, but he was betting on you, Clarke."

This time, Lexa kisses her with just the right amount of give, and it's precisely what Clarke doesn't ask her for.

**Author's Note:**

> Tu me comprends? Je veux t'aider: Do you understand me? I want to help you.
> 
> ma pauvre: poor thing.
> 
> Tu portes mon espoir, ma soeur: You have my hope, sister.


End file.
